Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Embedded systems are getting smaller and more sophisticated. While there are currently bare ARMs and 8/16-bit micros controlling our mainstream robots, this won't do for the more sophisticated (domestic) robots of the near future.

When we consider sophisticated robots (whether ruled by a subsumption architecture or other invariably concurrent system), we won't think of Python, Java, Ruby or Perl. We will be thinking of something more Erlang-like or perhaps Unix-y.

Can you imagine jacking into your robot's debug port, typing "ps" and seeing a collection of inter-communicating processes running on a Linux kernel? Or will it be something like Erlang/OTP? (Erlang is the dark horse here... Unix may never go away as a platform.)